WASHINGTON — In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, as loyalists fled or were pushed out, a once unlikely figure emerged as one of the last senior officials by his side: White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
A former congressman who represented far-western North Carolina in the U.S. House, Meadows was an early target of Trump’s now-banned Twitter account. But he became a trusted adviser to Trump over the years, eventually becoming his fourth and final chief of staff.
The conditions that left Meadows, 61, as the last senior aide standing in the turbulent White House were partly coincidence, sources who worked for Trump and under Meadows said.
He was willing to leave his congressional seat when Trump decided to replace former South Carolina Congressman Mick Mulvaney, and felt duty-bound to stick around as Trump fought unsuccessfully to stay in office.
“Mark didn’t really want to leave Congress but felt he needed to this last year,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh said. “And once he made the decision to take the new role, he’s loyal, he’s going to stay to the end.”
Trump thanked Meadows by name during his farewell address, the only White House staffer — outside of family — that the president mentioned.
Meadows began the job in the early days of the global health crisis, finally winning the position that the conservative’s critics said he spent three years chasing.
His tenure at the White House covered some of Trump’s most difficult months, beginning with the pandemic that has taken nearly half a million American lives.
Meadows was thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks after Trump made baseless claims of election fraud on a telephone call with Georgia election officials, playing mediator on the call in which Trump demanded they “find” enough votes to give him a second term as president.
He was also seen backstage prepping the president and giving a thumbs-up at a rally that preceded the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters hoping to stop Congress’ certification of the presidential election.
Sources familiar with the conversations taking place at the White House since the election complained that Meadows was too often a bystander as Trump made baseless claims about election fraud, and critics said that he tried too hard to ingratiate himself to Trump.
Meadows did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
His early attempts to consolidate power and exert control over White House staff, including a decision to replace most press and communications staff with his own aides, were described as “clumsy’‘ by multiple White House aides. Meadows loyalists rejected that criticism, saying those removed or reassigned were offered opportunities to stay.
Other officials said that Meadows had a hard time adjusting to not being the principal, often standing too close to Trump in moments when the spotlight should solely be on the president.
LAST ONE STANDING
Meadows came into the job determined not to make the mistakes that tripped up his predecessors, who all lost Trump’s confidence.
“He’s much more of a political adviser than someone that’s willing to tell the president the unfettered truth like a (John) Kelly would do,” one White House aide said after the Capitol attack, comparing Meadows to Trump’s second chief of staff.
When Trump was being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19, Meadows was one of the president’s only confidants. He and deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, who is also the White House director of social media, were the only Trump aides in the president’s hospital suite.
It was at that time that Meadows made one of his greatest public blunders as chief of staff, offering reporters a more dire description of Trump’s condition immediately after the president’s physician offered a more optimistic version at a news conference.
Although the president was said to be angry with Meadows during that episode, when Trump lost reelection it blunted discussions that had been taking place in and around White House about potentially replacing Meadows.
The relationship between Trump and Meadows wasn’t always so amicable.
Early in Trump’s term, the president unloaded Twitter broadsides on Meadows and a block of House conservatives refusing to support the GOP’s Affordable Care Act replacement plan. He then called Meadows demanding to know why he was blocking the bill backed by GOP leadership.
Meadows told him that GOP leaders were not not telling him the truth, said McIntosh, head of the Club for Growth. “Trump really didn’t believe him at first.”
But as Trump went through the battle over health care he “realized he wasn’t getting the full story” from Republican leadership “and so he started calling Mark Meadows all the time,” McIntosh said. “And that built this trust relationship.”
Meadows was among a group of lawmakers who grew close to Trump while he was in office, maintaining a steady presence at the White House and becoming a top ambassador for his agenda in Congress.
“The president called him on a very regular basis. It was nothing for Mark to get calls early, get calls late in the night from the president directly to seek his advice or counsel on any issue you could think of,” said Wayne King, Meadows’ chief of staff in Congress.
Meadows clearly relished having the president’s ear. In addressing reporters at the Capitol, he would often mention that he’d recently spoken to Trump or that the president had called him.
He initially endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 contest for the Republican nomination, but then Meadows became an advocate for the brash businessman from New York as soon as Trump secured the nomination. On the eve of the election, Meadows flew with Trump from Charlotte to Raleigh for one of the campaign’s final stops, assuring Trump that he would win North Carolina, which he did.
Meadows was best known, before his turn at Trump’s side, for forcing Republican House Speaker John Boehner out of office as leader of the small but powerful Freedom Caucus.
“Ambition is an amazing thing in the world of politics and a dangerous thing,” said former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford, a Republican who served with Meadows in Congress but lost his primary in 2018 after withering criticism from Trump.
Meadows, one of eight Republican lawmakers advising the White House during Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate last year, was tireless in defending the president on the Russia investigation.
Trump was at the same time becoming “disillusioned” with Mulvaney, and there was a “fairly short list of people that he would trust to do the job” and were willing to resign from Congress, a former White House official said.
“He was definitely somebody who was seeking this out,” the former official said, noting that few other congressional Republicans frequented the White House as much as Meadows did.
In December 2019, just after the House impeached Trump, Meadows announced he would not seek reelection, a signal to many that he would soon take over as chief of staff. On March 6, after Trump was acquitted in the Senate, he made Meadows’ new position official.
Meadows has since ruled out a bid for an open Senate seat in 2022, one that Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump is considering running for. Meadows said he has spoken to her and other Republicans about the race.
“My big question has been and will continue to be, ‘What is his standing amongst the Republican base?’ Trumpism is still alive and well within the Republican base. Whether that would help him in the future, who knows?” said Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in North Carolina.
“The natural trajectory that I would see is probably going to K Street and working the lobbying route, making money and then seeing what’s viable into the future.”
